It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman reading a Jane Austen novel must be in want of a happy ending.
She must be in want of the picturesque rolling hills of the English countryside; of hilarious supporting characters; of bonnets and empire-waist gowns and handsome soldiers and steamy flirtations.
The Jane Austen Book Club, a new film about Austen's books and the lives of the women (and a man) who read them, will be shown in limited release beginning Friday.
In the past two months, another movie based on Austen was released, Miramax's Becoming Jane. And beginning in January, PBS's Masterpiece Theatre will show film versions of all six of her novels. Why the sudden influx of Austen into modern-day culture?
University English Prof. Karen Chase believes it is not nostalgia for the past; rather, people are finding in Austen themes situations that are timeless and still relevant.
I was 12 years old when I first encountered Jane Austen, and I had come down with a fever at my aunt's house. Instead of chicken noodle soup or bed rest, my aunt's remedy was the BBC/A&E version of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." All six hours of it. From that moment on, I became a Janeite.
Since the premiere of the BBC version in 1995, there have been countless film adaptations of Austen's six novels. They range from the version of Sense and Sensibility that essentially launched Kate Winslet's career to the latest of Pride and Prejudice, which garnered Keira Knightley an Oscar nomination.
The Austen fever does not stop on screen. Browsing through the Student Bookstore, I came across The Jane Austen Book Club, Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure (which actually uses a point system; the reader tries to get enough points to marry P and P's Mr. Darcy), and my personal favorite, Jane Austen's Guide to Dating. (I actually recommend the latter. It was originally author Lauren Henderson's dissertation at Cambridge, and she manages to put a fresh spin on both the successful and failed Austenian relationships.)
With all the adaptations, is it even necessary to read the books? To those unfamiliar with her work, and even to those who may have read a novel or two, Austen can seem a bit, well, stodgy. Antiquated. Girly. On first read, the language can present a barrier to modern Janeites. Her characters, however, are so complex and so well-constructed that they seem to be alive, which renders them timeless. Some are terribly flawed; some seem to lose themselves in their quest for happiness; some are too flirtatious; and some are simply too cautious. The men and women in her books, although they live in such a constricting society, deal with the same issues that face modern-day lovers.
"She exposes all kinds of faults [in the characters] using wit and laughter," Chase said. "She uses them subversively in an attempt to reconcile the faults ... but she has a generous, affectionate tone while she's exposing. It's not just critique; it's a critique with hope and of a view towards community. In this day when everything feels so factionalized and lonely, her social vision is attractive to people."
Additionally, Austen's novels are perhaps the best documentation existing of what it was to be a woman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was a time where women essentially had no control over their own fates.
Austen herself alluded to the power of men in a slightly ironic way when she said, "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."
In Becoming Jane the (rather fictionalized) character of Jane says, "My characters shall have, after a little trouble, all that they desire."
We true Janeites can only hope that our beloved Jane Austen, though she never married, had all that she desired as well.
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